


A Different Type of Truth

by elescritora



Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: Angst, F/F, tw: attempted suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-04
Updated: 2019-05-04
Packaged: 2020-02-18 13:36:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,342
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18700666
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elescritora/pseuds/elescritora
Summary: Stranded on an uninhabited planet, Janeway can't deal with her new circumstances.





	A Different Type of Truth

**Author's Note:**

> Written in Nov 2004.

It has to be some kind of fate or karma or kismet – whatever you call it. Not that I used to believe in any of those, but the past few years have taught me much about many things: the crew; the world; desire; fear; need; survival.

Seven.

Myself.

I learned that depression can go further than wanting to die. It can mean wishing for death but not making it happen. It can mean living with failed attempts and those – or rather, the one – that knows all your weaknesses. But it can pass.

 

The way she looked at me in the medical hut after I woke up the next morning - the last time she was to look at me for weeks - was indescribable. I really mean that; I have no words for her expression, but inherent in it was a knowledge that I had never seen before. She didn’t and still doesn’t completely understand me, but she knows me better than anyone else ever has. I wonder if it has something to do with being so used to the intimacy of thoughts that were the hive mind; that she can surmise what another is thinking. Even without an intricate honeycomb of nanoprobes forcing a link. Then again, it could be related to her emotions. I’m not really sure. I just remember being strangely grateful to her, for her love, and her patience, and for knowing me enough to let me go when I needed it.

Of course, looking back on it, I realise she must have calculated the angles up there. The few microseconds on the cliff where she found me was sufficient time for her Borg brain to do so, with time to spare to consider the ramifications. She probably even had long enough for an internal philosophical discussion. I didn’t hear her at first but when I was standing there trying to gather up the courage to jump, she said my name. Not Captain, as she usually did when she was forced to speak to me, although the rest of them hadn’t called me that for a year at least. No, she called me Kathryn for the first time – whispered it, really, in this husky voice – and it startled me so much that I stumbled and began to fall. In that moment I reacted automatically, scrabbling for ground, my arms windmilling in the air, and she reached out and grabbed hold of my tunic.

As I dangled there in her grasp, with only my toes gripping onto the crumbling rock, she looked at me. It was a terrible, searching look and I felt as if she could see inside of me – see the cringing, shrinking, disgusting creature I had become. I dropped my gaze, unable to meet her eyes. The hungry instinct for survival disappeared again and I wanted oblivion. Peace from my thoughts. Absolution for my deeds and even more so for what I hadn’t done; what I should have done. She must have seen it because she let me go. It was an unexpected action, but perhaps, considering Human emotion and hers in particular, not an illogical one.

In the second it took for me to fall back over the edge, I had an unobstructed view of her face. That’s when I realised that she knew me and everything I’d been living with since the crash. She knew my innermost thoughts and secrets and how I’d been feeling. She looked sad and adoring at the same time. Forgiveness and love was in her face and I thought in that moment that maybe I did have something worth living for. It might have showed in my expression; maybe it had been her plan all along, I’m don’t know, but she gave me the gift of watching her face all the way to the bottom of the cliff. The cybernetic implants made her considerably heavier than me and she fell faster and harder and with a strategy that my flailing limbs lacked. That was how she got under me and broke my fall with her own body. The impact of the water and the rocks wasn’t enough for me to die. She activated her homing beacon before she passed out and apparently they found us within the hour. Selfishly, I had wanted to take my leave of life close to my people, so I’d feel less alone at last.

 

It’s hard to remember, sometimes, how it got so desperate in the first place. Logically, I can draw a timetable of all the events which pushed me deeper into depression. The crash, first of all, and then finding out that the warp engine was irreparable. Those were big ones, but I was still alright then. The knowledge that the planet had never before seen sentient life was more difficult, as was accepting that our temporary crash site now had to become a permanent home.

I think I hit my low point when I realised I wasn’t the Captain anymore. Certainly, people still called me that for a while, but it was to Chakotay they turned for leadership. And why not? This was the land; this was his place. It was blatantly apparent that this simple life was unbearable to me, more so than my teenage years on the farm had been. There at least I had had my family. Now, I would never see them again, and although I’d always known that was a probability, a distant hope had always existed. Now it was dashed to pieces and there was nothing I could do. Nothing I was good for. I was a failure at every menial task upon which our survival depended. Too small and weak to lift things, inept at cooking or cleaning, incapable of hunting and fishing adequately or even selecting vegetation fit for consumption. It was easy to let Chakotay take over, easy to let him ‘give me time to rest’, to ‘assess the situation’, to help the doctor alter Seven’s alcove to utilise solar power and a few other less important responsibilities. Soon these immediate tasks were complete, however, and it was only logical to have him continue to use his expertise for the best of my people. It was beyond easy, beyond logical; it was essential to allow them to survive.

They didn’t need me, their strong, brave Captain; the glue which held the ship together. What is a Captain without a functional ship? I was just a woman again, and it had been so long that I was inept at that too. I no longer knew how to just be. I didn’t know how to be Human, just super-human. Just a Captain.

I thought that I would at least have company in my incompetence, but Seven proved more Human than anyone could have expected.

It was not that less contact with technology made her seem less technological herself; on the contrary, she used whatever she could to do what was necessary – and then some. Seven, however, with no experience of planet-side life, had no ideals and expectations. She made her own rules, created her own methods. She blended technology and simplicity in a way that no-one else would have considered. Each and every person on that planet was in awe of her skill, and indebted to her immeasurably.

During those first few hungry weeks, she endeared herself to them. She was no longer Borg, different, an ‘ice princess’ – she was one of them, struggling to survive in much the same way. Unaware of any traditional fishing technique, she improvised by standing in the water and using her implants to give off an electrical surge, providing an entire day’s worth of food for the crew in one moment. Her ability to see in the dark meant she could hunt at night while animals were sleeping and easily caught. Her strength made it possible to travel long distances and carry large carcasses back to camp on her own, freeing up others for work they were more suited to. Large assimilated animals, controlled by Seven, did much of the heavy work that the weakened crew could not manage. She worked at repairing technology that could function outside of the ship and made water tight windows and skylights from small forcefields, making cramped make-shift shelters seem hospitable. Generally, she buoyed everyone’s spirits with her calm practicality and ability to get things done.

The survival of Voyager’s crew was as much a result of Seven’s hard work as it was Chakotay’s leadership.

Throughout it all she never forgot me. She was too busy for philosophical discussions, Velocity and Da Vinci’s studio were out, and it was strange trying to make small talk with a person who didn’t like to so much as sit down. Sometimes I’d find things though – a freshly prepared non-Talaxian meal just inside my tent; some cheerful flowers planted outside my door; a woven hammock dangling between the trees by the creek, in my favourite place for dreaming the day away. I knew it was her, she knew that I knew, but nothing was ever said. It was too personal, somehow, for words. Like a magic spell, or a wish that won’t come true if another person hears you speak it.

I knew that I loved her then, and I thought that she loved me. I was afraid. Terrified. I didn’t want this to be happening to me. I didn’t want her to be happening to me, but I could feel it; leaching my bones and seeping out of me. Myself, ebbing away from me. I felt as if some invisible force was constricting around me. Love was forcing the useless Captain from me. It was making me the woman that I had to become, but that I had no idea how to be. I felt like I was losing what was left of myself – of the only self I knew – and there was nothing I could do about it.

So I clung to myself with all that I had.

I didn’t return the gestures. I didn’t do anything. I just let her love me, and showed nothing in return but a cold exterior, as I retreated ever further into myself. The more remote I became, the more she tried to reach me, until at last I think she seemed to come to some decision. I don’t know what it was, but she left me alone after that. She might have thought I needed it. Maybe she was just tired of me and my lack of response. After a while she spent the majority of her time with the others, people who liked her now and who weren’t afraid to be with her. Who weren’t afraid to love her. I had me back again, all to myself. The Captain alone.

I was miserable.

I retract what I said before, about my low point being when I realised I wasn’t the Captain anymore. My low point was actually the night Seven got drunk and slept with Harry Kim. I saw her the next morning from my hammock, stumbling out of his cabin with her roughly woven tunic just pulled up enough to cover her. At an isolated pool surrounded by reeds and small saplings, I watched as she scrubbed at her body with abrasive sand. She didn’t see or hear me because she was too absorbed in her tears. I knew she was in pain. It had obviously been an alcohol-induced mistake but I was jealous and angry and scared and so dreadfully alone. So I left her to deal with it by herself. I watched her avoid him and become icy again. Her friends fell away from her. Several months later, watching her stand alone in her doorway, staring inefficiently into nothingness, I had a moment of self-realisation. I could have helped her, the way she had tried to help me. I realised that I could have spared this woman, whom I loved, much of this agony.

And that was where my utter uselessness became apparent to me. It had to end.

 

You know what I did. You know what she did. You know that we both survived. I thought that maybe though, with my foolish actions, we’d killed our love, if not our bodies. I felt worse then, than I ever had before. I regretted trying to die, and I regretted surviving more. But that look on her face on the way over the cliff – for that, I forced myself to keep on living. Living it seems, is often harder than dying. I considered it hopeless, as the weeks went by without her, but life was more punishment than death and I thought I deserved to hurt.

 

Earlier this morning, however, I found a coffee bean plant in a small clay pot on my doorstep. Instead of taking it in quietly and spending my day gazing upon it in the light from my window, as I once would have done; I picked up my plant, plucked up my courage and went and knocked on her door. My heart was hammering the whole way over and the sweat from my palms made dark red-brown handprints on the pot I was holding. I reminded myself what had happened the last time I’d ignored her overtures and that kept me moving until I reached her door.

She said she’d never wanted to try coffee before, but when she nervously invited me in, I saw she had a battered coffee grinder sitting on the table inside. There were more coffee bean plants growing behind her hut, where we sat together later, drinking in companionable silence.

I know she was lying, about trying the coffee. That was ok. It was almost normal. Between us, it seems lies are just another version of honesty.

After we’d emptied the tiny wooden cups, I told her I didn’t love her. She said she didn’t love me either. We smiled at each other and kissed in the sunshine, and then finally, I felt like me again. Just me; a woman, in her home, with her family.


End file.
